I am pretty new to linux and hooked and when i decided to try it i gave myself two partitions being a previous windows power user I gave myself 260 GB on the first part of my HDD and 57GB on my linux partition. I am running suse 10.2.

I want to remove my 260GB first partition and move my suse partition to be the beginning and the whole drive then I'm going to install vmware for my windows stuff.

TIA for the help!!!

I didn't quite get that. You're going make Suse the entire drive then try to install VMWare? It won't work. VMWare is itself an OS (Linux) based. You install virtual machines on the VMWare base not the other way around. That is to say you can install Suse on top of VMWare but not VMWare on top of Suse.

You could still have Suse and VMWare on different partitions possibly. Since VMWare expects to run the show it may not play well with a grub configuration like that. Haven't done it myself.

I am just going to run a vmware workstation inside suse same partition. I have it running on a laptop I'm not going to run an esx server. My main issue is the repartitioning all the rest is just details that don't matter. I like my suse install. i just want to make it the whole disk without losing my suse partition... basically a a resize.

Well rather than "resizing" what you can do is just break the other partition into separate mounts that you mount on top of your Suse root filesystem. That way you don't even disturb the Suse except by updating /etc/fstab to make them mount automatically.

e.g. Say you currently have suse with
/
/boot

You could either delete the other partition completely then make multiple partitions (extended) or better yet just put that other partition into Logical Volume Manager (LVM) as a Physical Volume (PV) then you can break it into Logical Volumes (LVs) as you need to. That is to say it is there waiting for you to allocate it for specific purposes rather than just putting it all out in the world.
Of course you could just make it all one big mount say by mounting it as /beaucoupspace. You would then just install everything you want into that new filesystem.

lol that sounds good except I'm a newb at linux and I don't even know where things install or how to install them in other areas so I figured I'd just try to make it free space. Most of my data goes in my home dir which is all out of one partition so I basically want a basic point in the direction of how I would go about removing all of the old partition which is mounted /windows/c it is automatically mounted in my fstab and just add it all to my linux partition which is all one partition. thanks for your help!

Bascially I was suggesting you use fdisk (or similar utility) to convert the windows partition to a Linux partition. You would then be able to use mkfs on the new Linux partition to make it into a filesystem.

To use all of that new partition as /home you could:
mv /home /home.old
mkdir /home
mount <partition device> /home
cp -pR /home.old/* /home
ls -lR /home

If the ls -lR /home shows it has all the contents you had in /home.old you can rm -rf /home.old.

You'd want to add /home to /etc/fstab to it automatically remounts on boot.

For each of the commands I listed above you can type "man <commnad>" for more detail.

As noted in my prior post the above approach would leave your original Suse installation alone.

For partitioning I would suggest gparted. You can download an iso and burn a live CD. It should be able to handle re-sizing partitions quite easily...
Good luck!

Ok I tried gparted but it had an x11 failure every boot... so i used yast 2 and it worked I can't resize my smaller partition but I made a new partition and I said to mount it as /home

Now my user account won't open at all....

I get "could not start kstartupconfig" all of my user files are gone.

I tried to create a different user but same thing happens...

If you just mounted it as home instead of doing the mv and cp steps I listed above it means you mounted the new filesystem on TOP of the existing /home.

The good news is that means you didn't lose anything.

Login as root.

Type "df -h /home" and note the device you see (e.g. /dev/hdb1) so you'll know what to mount when done.

Type "umount /home" to unmount the new filesystem.

Type "df -h /home" again to insure it now shows /home as part of / rather than a separate filesystem.

Type "mv /home /home.old"

Type "mkdir /home"

Type "mount <device> /home" where device is the the one you saw in the first df -h above.

Type "cp -pR /home.old/* /home" - This will copy all the files from your old home directory to the new one. The p flag will tell it to keep the same permissions, times, ownership and groups. The R flag is recursive.

At some point after you've verified all the files in /home are the ones that were in /home.old you can do "rm -rf /home.old". No hurry on that - just something to do to free up the space that was there.